Akka vs LangChain (2026)

Agents call function tools and MCP tools as the model requests, services integrate over REST, OpenAPI, gRPC, WebSocket and Kafka or other brokers, and guardrails check MCP tool requests and responses.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/sdk/agents.html.mdread 2026-09-27

Agents act in outside systems through custom tools, callable functions the model invokes to fetch data, query databases and take actions, plus tools from MCP servers through the langchain-mcp-adapters library and a large provider integration catalog.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langchain/tools and /langchain/mcpread 2026-09-21

Durable workflows run long multi step processes with compensation and resume from the current step after a restart, agents share a session under a workflow, and autonomous agents coordinate by delegation, handoff, teams and moderation with a registry for dispatching to specialists at runtime.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/sdk/workflows.html.mdread 2026-09-27

LangGraph is a low level orchestration runtime that mixes deterministic, hand coded steps with LLM driven agent steps in one graph, with durable execution, subgraphs and multi agent patterns, so fixed nodes and autonomous agent steps run in the same flow.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langgraph/overviewread 2026-09-21

Timed Actions schedule delayed and recurring calls, Consumers react to event streams and Kafka topics, and Akka Streaming processes real time inputs such as IoT metrics, audio and video that can start agents, alongside HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket and MCP endpoints.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/llms.txtread 2026-09-27

Every run starts when the customer's own code invokes or streams the agent, so every channel is one the customer wires up, and the open source frameworks ship no schedule, webhook or event source that wakes an agent on its own. Webhooks and cron are LangSmith Deployment features, a separate product.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/deepagents/going-to-productionread 2026-09-21

Durable memory can hold semantic knowledge and retrieved data, and a sample RAG agent shows vector search with streaming, but indexing and retrieval over a customer's documents is code the developer writes. Akka does not ship a knowledge store of its own.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/akka-memory.html.mdread 2026-09-27

The frameworks ship a retrieval layer in which documents are loaded, split, embedded and indexed in a vector store, then queried by similarity through a retriever, so new customer knowledge enters a persistent index without retraining. The vector store backend is one the customer chooses from the integration catalog.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langchain/knowledge-baseread 2026-09-21

Akka Memory keeps session memory for the turns of an interaction and durable long term memory across users, sessions and agents, scoped per session, per agent or shared, stored as an event sourced journal that is both the in memory tier and the durable record, with compaction of older context. Akka does not publish retention or deletion terms.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/akka-memory.html.mdread 2026-09-27

LangGraph has two persistence systems. Checkpointers persist a thread's state as short-term, thread-scoped memory, and stores persist long-term memory across threads, namespaced by user or any other key, which agents read and write from their tools.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langgraph/persistence and /langchain/long-term-memoryread 2026-09-21

A workflow can pause for an approval command and resume where it left off, durably across crashes, deployments and days; autonomous agent pipelines carry a human approval task between drafting and publishing; Akka Verify HITL boundaries block in a reviewer queue until a person decides; and guardrails check model and MCP tool requests and responses, failing closed.

Sourceakka.io/llms-full.txtread 2026-09-27

Human-in-the-loop middleware checks each tool call against a configurable per-tool policy, halts on an interrupt with state saved, and lets a person approve, edit or reject the call before execution resumes. The built-in guardrail middleware adds PII detection and model and tool call limits.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langchain/human-in-the-loop and /langchain/guardrailsread 2026-09-21

The trust center (Akka dba Lightbend, Inc.) lists SOC 2 Type II on request, a public SOC 3, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, PCI DSS, HIPAA and GDPR among 50 standards, and Akka Automated Operations provides access control at the organization level, with secured HTTP and gRPC endpoints and secrets management in the SDK.

Sourcetrust.akka.ioread 2026-09-27

The frameworks run inside the customer's application with no hosted service or user layer. Tools are held to least privilege through Deep Agents filesystem permission rules and a security policy on scoping agent credentials and sandboxing. Identity and authorization come from LangSmith's auth layer, so no identity providers or provisioning standards are named for the frameworks themselves, and no attestation is published for the open source packages.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/deepagents/permissions and /security-policyread 2026-09-21

A non sampled, hash chained interaction log records each agent interaction with authority snapshots, Verify emits typed events for every guardrail, human and evaluation decision, the local and Akka console show traces for debugging, and metrics, logs and traces export over OpenTelemetry.

Sourceakka.io/llms.txtread 2026-09-27

The open source frameworks expose step-by-step state history through checkpoints that can be replayed or forked, and stream each step as it runs, so tool calls and outputs can be inspected per step. Tracing, monitoring and dashboards require a LangSmith account, and the frameworks have no audit log separate from runtime traces.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langgraph/observability and /langgraph/use-time-travelread 2026-09-21

Akka runs self managed on the customer's own VMs, containers, Kubernetes, PaaS or edge, or through Akka Automated Operations in the customer's VPC or Akka's serverless cloud, with projects pinned to chosen regions, multi region replication and data pinning, and sovereign cloud deployments for China, Hong Kong, Singapore, North America, Canada and the EU.

Sourceakka.io/llms-full.txtread 2026-09-27

The frameworks install as packages into the customer's own application and run on the customer's infrastructure, with state persisted to checkpointer backends the customer operates, such as SQLite and Postgres, so data storage stays where the customer puts it. Managed cloud, hybrid and self hosted server options belong to LangSmith Deployment, a separate product.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langgraph/checkpointers and /langgraph/deployread 2026-09-21

A samples and blueprints catalog filters by AI use case, pattern, domain and governance: downloadable working samples such as a medical tagging agent with human verification, a real estate customer service agent and an IoT monitoring agent, plus 460 blueprints that the Akka Specify plugin turns into runnable systems.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/getting-started/samples.html.mdread 2026-09-27

LangChain publishes two complete open source agents built on Deep Agents: Deep Agents Code, a terminal coding agent with persistent memory, skills and approval controls, and OpenWiki, a CLI that writes and maintains a Markdown wiki as durable context for coding agents. The create_agent harness and the tutorial agents are building blocks to assemble, not finished agents.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/deepagents/code/overview and /oss/openwiki/overviewread 2026-09-21

Nine providers are built in, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Vertex AI, Bedrock, Mistral, Hugging Face, Ollama and LocalAI, any other plugs in as a custom provider, each agent can set its own model, and an AI Gateway Router and Akka Optimize route work to served open weight models.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/sdk/integrations/ai-and-models.html.mdread 2026-09-27

The developer initializes a model from any supported provider with init_chat_model, and the provider catalog spans OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and many others.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langchain/modelsread 2026-09-21

The Akka SDK is the component model for agents, workflows, entities, views and endpoints, services expose HTTP, gRPC and MCP endpoints with A2A and ACP built into agents, and a CLI and Claude Code plugin with an MCP server manage projects. The runtime is source available under BSL.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/llms.txtread 2026-09-27

LangChain is itself an SDK, published for Python and TypeScript with a full API reference, and is called directly from the customer's own code, services and CI.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/reference/overview and /langchain/overviewread 2026-09-21

EvalKit scores a service against a dataset of eval cases with deterministic, heuristic and agentic evaluators, saves baselines that CI gates regressions against, and renders reports; RedKit red teams against AILuminate and OWASP LLM Top 10 taxonomies, and Verify runs evaluations inline or over the interaction log.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/testing/evaluation/index.html.mdread 2026-09-27

The open source agentevals package scores the customer's agent trajectory, by deterministic trajectory match in four modes or by an LLM judge, and a fake chat model lets unit tests script exact responses as fixtures, so a change can be evaluated before release without LangSmith. LangSmith datasets and online evaluations sit in LangSmith, a separate product.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/langchain/test/evals and /langchain/test/unit-testingread 2026-09-21

Akka is a runtime and SDK for backend agentic services, with no browser or computer use component.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/llms.txtread 2026-09-27

The frameworks ship no browser, desktop or computer control of their own. Browser tools reach third party engines such as Browserbase and Bedrock AgentCore Browser, each sold separately with its own account and key. Deep Agents sandboxes run code and do not operate a browser or desktop.

SourceLangChain, docs.langchain.com/oss/python/integrations/providers/browserbaseread 2026-09-21